


The Water Runs Black

by Suffer Bravely (Shamu)



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22976170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shamu/pseuds/Suffer%20Bravely
Summary: She asks him. No, commands him.Take it off.Shed your monstrous skin, shed your past, shed yourself. She demands to see flesh, puckered and raw and pale, alive and trembling. He refuses, he refuses her at every turn. Can’t she see that he’s too busy opening up soft bodies to confirm over (and over and over) again that there’s nothing but flesh beneath them all, that good men fade into the light of day just as easily as the wicked?When was the last time you took a bath?
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Dedue Molinaro, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 6
Kudos: 71





	The Water Runs Black

“Come now, Felix - we have our future King to entertain! It would do you good to have a bath, after all.” 

“Father, no, I don’t want to! I don’t want him to see…” 

“To bathe together like brothers, there can be no shame in that, now can there? Get in here, boy!” 

Dimitri glanced up at Rodrigue’s smirking face through the fringes of his long hair, his own boyish eyes wide and as watery as the warm bath water he was immersed in. 

“I.. I’m sorry, if he doesn’t want to… it was just an idea!” 

“Ach, do not worry yourself, Your Highness,” Rodrigue’s smirk began widen into a grin that put Dimitri at ease. “If anyone should be apologising, it is I. It seems I have raised a son who is ashamed of his body. Worse. Ashamed of being seen as vulnerable in front of his sovereign. That won’t do, now will it?” 

Pulling his legs up to his chest, Dimitri hid his eyes behind his hair as he glanced down to the water’s surface.

“I just thought that… it could be fun. Baths at my house are, um. Really different.”

“Oh?” Rodrigue knelt down, lowering himself below Dimitri’s eye level, trying to catch his gaze through that mop of hair. “Your father would always turn bath time into something of a riot back in our Academy days. I would not be surprised if they have had to tear up all the flooring from his quarter. Funny, is it not, how water can cleanse the body but also rot the wood, each with as little effort.” 

Dimitri glanced back at Rodrigue then, a smile trembling across his face. 

“R..really? Oh. I don’t think I have ever had a bath with Father.” 

“Ah,” Rodrigue smile tightened. “Patricia, then?” 

Dimitri nodded, watching the edges of Rodrigue’s kindly eyes lighten as his smile began to touch them. Patricia… Patricia would never even meet his gaze. It was not that she had been unkind or cruel but… he always felt such an awkwardness around her whenever she decided it was time that he wash. She’d flinch as she’d pour the water through his hair, going so quiet as it flattened and lengthened in the damp, wringing her fingers through it over and over again. He’d rarely bring himself to speak, hating how his voice would echo in the silent room; reverberating against her great blank nothingness. 

Rodrigue, still on his knees, brushed the still-dry hair out of his eyes and tucked it messily behind his ear.

“Yes, I can imagine how that might be quite different.” 

Then, tilting his head back, he began to yell again - “Felix! Are you ready yet?”

“No! I’m not doing it!” Mumbled the door, and Rodrigue sighed to himself. 

“A funny boy, isn’t he? Just like his brother as this age. Please, Your Highness, if you would excuse me?” 

Straightening himself up to his full height, Dimitri watched as he placed a hand on his chest, bowing slightly. Then, just like that, he swept out of the door and into the chaos that lurked outside.

It was… nice. Listening to them squabble. That was probably a terrible thing to think, but Dimitri placed his head on his knees, smiling to himself as he just listened to the vague shapes of it. He loved coming to the Fraldarius household - it was small, despite their great import, and cluttered with weapons and shields and stories of great heroes, conquests and anecdotes. They felt like… real people, not like the living symbol that he or his father or anyone in his family was supposed to embody. Even Gilbert looked like a statue, friendly as he was. 

So when that moment of perfect peace was quite suddenly interrupted, Felix’s naked body shoved into the room as his terrible whining and Rodrigue’s laughter were both amplified by the room… Dimitri could have cried. He decided, then and there, that he would like to etch this memory into himself forever. 

Though, it would be hard to forget.

Felix’s bright brown eyes looked at him with dagger-sharp precision, his cheeks red and his lip curled inwards as he bit at it.

“Hi Felix,” he said, tentatively. 

“Now, Felix, what do you say?” Rodrigue stood behind him, though the boy’s chest was puffing rapidly, his nostrils flaring. 

“Good evening.”

“Good evening your…?”

“Um, it’s okay, you don’t-“ 

“Your _Highness_ ,” Felix mumbled, glancing to the floor. 

“Now. Your Highness has invited you to join him for his nightly bath. When was the last time you took a bath, Felix?”

“Hmph,” Felix muttered, crossing his arms as his gaze now turned to the water. 

“It is the future King’s judgement that his subjects must not be uncleanly, lest we offend with our natural selves. I find it a relief. There are those within the nobility that consider washing oneself to be quite impure. I fear, someday, that you will go down that path. Always playing outside in the mud… Look at your feet!” 

Dimitri could see Felix’s eyes getting hot as the edges of them glittered slightly, his constant lip-chewing only getting worse the longer his father spoke. Kicking his feet rather than look at him, the boy’s face went almost completely red. 

“I don’t stink, or, or I smell way less bad than you do when you’ve had a glass of your disgusting _juice_.” 

Felix’s attempt to bite appeared to sink into no flesh, Rodrigue’s laughter gently echoing. 

“Felix, just… get in the bath.” 

Reaching to pat his head, Felix flinched away with the slight flash of his teeth - but he finally acquiesced. Practically jumping into the bath, the water swelled up to Dimitri’s chin as it sloshed angrily about. 

Untugging his hair from behind his ear, he lowered his head again. 

“I’m sorry, Felix, I …” 

A wave of water suddenly smacked him in the face, warm and blinding as it blurred his vision. Crying out, the anger bled bright and raw as he slashed his hands into the water, splashing the boy right back - once, and then twice, the third causing water to roll out of the bath as Felix’s shrieking gurgled away. 

Blinking as the world sharpened back into view, Dimitri’s chest was heaving as he saw Rodrigue’s fingers clamped tightly around Felix’s arm, his face serious.

“You do not splash your future King, Felix.” 

“He splashed me!” 

“That is his right. As King, he may strike you if he so desires. Make a fool of you in front of all the world’s subjects. It is your job to bow your head and let it flow over you.” 

Dimitri’s chest still heaved, his eyes widened to their limit, watery and threatening to overflow. He… he didn’t know why he had done that, why he wasn’t the one getting in trouble for taking it too far, why he had… enjoyed hearing Felix make that awful sound. He didn’t enjoy it now. He didn’t. 

Clutching his head, he peered back down at the water, shame overcoming him. 

“Is it true?”

“Hm?” Rodrigue glanced over to Dimitri, lifting a pan of water to bring it over Felix’s head. “Of course it is. Why, even I am at your beck and call, Your Highness. You may even splash me, if you’d like.” 

His chuckle was drowned out by the pan spilling over his son’s head, the boy sitting there in a furious huff, expression unchanging. 

“No, is … is it true that you and Father, bathed together at the Academy…?”

“That’s what you want to know about?”

“Yes… Father doesn’t … speak much about his time then.”

“Ah… well, you will see when you get there,” he smiled, untangling Felix’s hair and beginning to wash the back of his neck. “Garreg Mach has a wonderful set of baths. Steam rooms, too. I expect you both to have a lot of fun while you are there, just as we did, so long as Felix can keep to his studies and his book-learning.” 

Leaning down to Felix’s eye level, Rodrigue brushed his beard against his skin, causing the boy to jump and lash his hand out against his father’s face, a half formed ‘stop it’ squeezed out of him. “You will study, won’t you?” “Yes -“ “Read all those books Margrave Gautier so kindly let you?” “YES! Just STOP it!” 

Finally ceasing his relentless assault, he lifted the boy’s arm and began to scrub under there, Felix’s expression of utter humiliation filling Dimitri both with a deep sense of guilt but also a far more powerful compulsion to laugh.

“Laugh away,” the boy muttered. “He’ll be doing it to you next.” 

“I hope,” Dimitri giggled, his hands crossing in front of his mouth as he grew overly conscious of his expression. “I hope that we will see it together.” 

“Just as our fathers did. We’ll have a lot… a lot of fun, I’m sure of it.” 

Rodrigue’s smile brought him more faith than Felix’s muffled ‘yeah, I guess’, but the thought of that future was bright and sparkling and impossibly pure.

Perhaps then.

Perhaps he would see El again. 

If she studied hard… if he studied hard… 

He imagined, even though it was silly, he imagined the water washing away all of the world’s sins. Rhea’s painted face staring down from the wall of the living room, her gentle smile bubbling as she scrubbed away the dirt that had caught under his nails. 

Rodrigue though… Rodrigue had been right. 

For some, the water purified. For others, it brought only rot. 

* * *

The water ran clear. 

The image of Felix’s face had already began to wash itself away from his memory, sodden and curled inwards. Tattered segments of that day remained, Rodrigue’s words, the warmth of the water, the guilt that felt as though it lingered over everything before it had all been drenched in blood. 

The night was cold and Glenn’s smile was uneasy. Always on him, a grin that flickered in the dark, half-formed and like a sliver of moon. Steam rose from the Monastery’s baths, a constant trickle the only sound that accompanied him in this empty corner of the world. 

“Glenn,” he spoke his name, the moon shivering between his teeth. In saying it, it was though his manifestation became clearer, the edges of his eyes blurring into view. Red. Like slits of red. Pointed but curled, that smile touching them. 

“Will you join me for my bath tonight?”

This would not help him sleep. He knew it would not, and yet, he held his hand out anyway. 

“Your brother… I’m afraid he would refuse me, despite your father’s best intentions.” 

Glenn tilted his head, his own hand unmoving from the hilt of his sword. 

“I know. This is not the time to rest,” he stared out into the black, willing those eyes back into existence. Had they been like Felix’s were now? Long and thin and always narrow as he raged about one thing or another. Glenn, did you really look so like your brother? Or has one memory washed away another? 

“Yet, perhaps if you were to join me… we could clean your amour.”

His armour vanished, revealing only flesh, lithe and blurred and heaving that agonising red in the place where his stomach was meant to be. 

Dimitri himself began to undress, buttons undone, belt clattering to the floor. His own body, pristine by comparison, white and trembling and still alive, still pulsing, still warm. He studied Glenn’s nakedness now, without shame, the smell of it now ringing in his head - like rancid meat, like a cry for his mother, like the taste of iron and steel and hot death all at once. His crying rang louder and then louder still, though Glenn’s mouth was not moving, his face still splattered with that grin. 

“Join me, Glenn, please.” 

No whinging, no splashing, no having to be forced beneath the water’s surface. They stepped in to those deep-set baths, wide enough to swim in, and Dimitri watched himself begin to melt. Hands black beneath the surface, trembling beneath the ripples, slipping out of view as he reached for Glenn’s stomach.

He wanted to scrub him clean, scrub away all that deep black and red that had spilled for him, immerse it in enough blue that it would close over and heal.

Glenn’s hand clamped down on his wrist before he could reach, his hands so unbearably cold despite the water’s heat. 

He stared at him, and began to bloat, rot, fester before his eyes - the water, the water, the water does nothing for the dead, of course it doesn’t, of course he cannot clean away those wounds and hope against hope for some kind of salvation because! That blood! That blood is all he has left! A permanent reminder of what had to avenged, what had been given for the sake of the Kingdom, what had been ripped pointlessly away and he had been trying to scrub it all away and now!

Now!

Dimitri threw his hands out, lashing at the water as he attempted to drown out Glenn’s ceaseless wailing, splashing and splashing and splashing but it never stopped flowing back to him. 

“Your Highness,” a solid, stable voice cut the air, Glenn all but vanishing save his lingering grin glittering about the surface. 

He fumbled, searching desperately for his own face as Dedue’s name trembled in his throat. Of course. He should never have come to the baths alone. 

“I… apologise, Dedue. I did not see you standing there.” 

“It is alright.”

He stared, wide-eyed for a while, but Dedue’s stoicism bled easily into the air, calming his breathing.

“Please, Your Highness. Allow me to wash your hair.” 

The ringing still scratched at the edges of his mind’s surface, but as he turned back to face the water… it was still, calm, even. Strange, how it could absorb even his most fitful blows with ease, slipping back into its smooth skin as though nothing had ever happened. 

He resolved to take note of that, refusing to let despair slip by. 

“I would greatly appreciate that. Thank you, Dedue.” 

Forcing his lips to form a smile, he sat at the edge of the bath and watched as Dedue knelt. He knew… he knew that he must have heard him. Every word of his rambling, the names of the dead peeling from his lips. Yet, he made no indication of having been affected by it at all, his face firm and diligent as always. 

Dedue. 

He wanted to ask. 

Don’t you ever see the veins of your countrymen, still spilling blood? 

Don’t you ever think it wrong, the whole world absolutely mad, that so much suffering can go on around us while we sit and find peace in this tidy little monastery? 

Don’t you ever feel it impossible to go on with this charade, this pretending that there is even an ounce of civility left in our bodies when we have seen everything that lies beneath it? 

He doesn’t. He doesn’t ask that. 

“Dedue …”

He rolled his eyes up towards his, those hard whorls of green. 

“Will you join me, after you are finished?” 

It was a foolish question. An embarrassing question. 

Yet he could see it in his face, the disapproval before it is even said. Dimitri’s brows curl together, his eyes shutting. 

“No, Your Highness. It would not be appropriate.” 

“It is… quite normal, for friends to bathe together, after all.”

“Our relationship is not one of friendship.” 

Of course not.

Of course. 

“I understand,” he said, and slips beneath the water’s surface, Dedue’s hands moving expertly through his hair as he washes out the filth of the day. 

* * *

The water runs black. 

Father’s sitting opposite him, headless and cold, neck still spilling words that he can’t quite make out. 

You’ve changed. 

He hears her words and he can choose whether to hold them or crack them in two, so he does neither. He says nothing, but she is not wrong. 

Father’s face is a dull and painless memory, a blurry thumbprint where he was sure a wide smile used to be. He remembers that this is a memory. He asks to see him in his crown. 

He can’t feel the water, if it’s hot or cold, sensation like that no longer matters.

What matters is that his father is holding out his crown, lowering it onto the boy’s head who is no longer a boy and he who is no longer man who is no longer a father. 

The crown melts. It’s dripping gold.

Are you ok? 

He hears her words and turns his back to her, lowers his head and watches as the crown spills down his face, all that gold now dripping red. 

They used to wear jewels and finery, drip gold from every angle, feathers and furs and cloaks and silks that take years and years of skill to tan to stretch to make. Made by hands that are not their own, talents that could only have been bled from the Goddess - who else? We wear crowns and hats and titles as proudly as our crests, fan them out to tell the story of the strong and to subjugate the weak who can lay claim to none of these things. We trick ourselves into believing our own stories, seduced by beauty and beauty alone. 

And all things we label beautiful are things that are fragile. Lace so soft and so intricate that he cannot help but rip apart in his hands, a soft voice calling to him through the endless screaming that he cannot help but turn away from, the way the rat’s body compliantly opens as he slits his lance across its middle that he cannot help but notice how those organs mirror his own. How, when it’s missing its head, it looks no different from his Father sitting calmly. How, even it cries softly as its life is cut from its body and flows instead into the world.

There’s nothing fragile left in him.

His skin has turned black and hardened, plate crashing over plate, from his shoulders he’s sprouted endless layers of rotten fur, matted and stinking as it grows endlessly down his back, slowly swallowing the flag of his kingdom - its blue just a wound gaping against encroaching black. 

Yet. She asks him. No, commands him. 

Take it off. 

Shed your monstrous skin, shed your past, shed yourself. She demands to see flesh, puckered and raw and pale, alive and trembling. He refuses, he refuses her at every turn. Can’t she see that he’s too busy opening up soft bodies to confirm over (and over and over) again that there’s nothing but flesh beneath them all, that good men fade into the light of day just as easily as the wicked? 

When was the last time you took a bath? 

Rodrigue chuckling, voice echoing as he grabs Felix by the scruff of the neck, his legs kicking furiously. 

“Why? Does my appearance offend you? Then you have not spend enough time among the dead.” 

Does she want that to change?  
  
She looks at him, fearless, defiant.

Almost beautiful.

He wonders, if he touched her, how easily she would crack beneath his fingers. 

But he doesn’t touch her, she’s the one who touches him. Slips off his boots, still wet and sodden from the day. Unlaces the layers of plate, places them gently on the floor. He grunts as she does what she will, decides to observe whatever it is she will do to him. Unclipping and untying, hands that move without pause, fixated with a gaze that was close to inhuman. Perhaps his first impression of her had been correct, perhaps that spark he had seen was the exact same lie that she saw in him now. 

Shells of plate scattered around him, chainmail unlinked, furs to the floor. It had been difficult. Some of the clasps had been caked shut with a dark red crust. 

Her hands, trembling. 

Her eyes, widening.

“Will you kill me now?” 

She shakes her head, carefully brushes her fingers over his skin, hovers over wounds where flesh tries to escape skin and into the world. The red and black where his armour has tried to fuse with that beneath, where the body cracks and can no longer make sense of itself, two halves trying to find one another. It always fascinated him, how Patricia could patch up a tear in his clothes, how it never looked quite the same.

He imagines. A thin line round his father’s head, stitched together in bright bright blue. 

Her hands rush over him, hot and warm. His stomach twitches under her, body subconsciously writhing away from her, that touch too holy for one such as he. What would she do? Pour magic into those yawning holes, scrub away his bruises? It would not matter. The flesh remembers. Scars battlegrounds where two sides have finally lain down their banners, come together to ask 

Where have you been? 

He cannot answer. Her absence the wound that had not yet closed, two pieces of skin reencountering one another. He wants to drive his fingers in between it, twist it open and ensure it never heals, but… 

She leads him, but he can hardly remember following. Naked and through that monastery (some families consider it impure, this nakedness, wicked and soiled and…), down passed ruins that are gluttonous and fat with memories. Her being here brings them all back with solid clarity - the things he swore to hold onto, the things he did not. 

The light begins to strip itself from him, shaft by shaft.

She takes him to the baths. 

She speaks, but… 

Can words save anyone, anymore? 

She speaks and says,

“Dimitri…” 

Soft in his mouth, softer than he deserves, buzzing in the air. It should be screamed, he thinks. From the very back of the throat. From your stomach. From your spine. Say it in the way you don’t need a head for. Say it the way my Father does. Please. 

The way you speak.

Is cruel.

She says it again, like he’s lace. Touches his arm, leads him to the waters edge.

“Am I weak?” He mutters and she shakes her head. “Then don’t speak to me like I’m a child.”

He stares at the lip of the water, watches the way the light makes no sense of it. It’s enough. It’s enough to prove that he’s still alive, even if the patch of black that fills out his eye socket resembles a skull. He looks away, head to the sky, and walks with her into the water.

When you dip your hands into the water, the shape gets blurrier the further it gets from your body, darker, until it disappears beneath that rim of filth. With each step, the water darkened. Red. Wine. Black. His hands disappear beneath it all. His flesh fading into dim blood. 

Rodrigue and his father, laughing here. 

Felix’s boyish feet, brown with mud.

Her hands, so warm, so impossibly soft - running over every wound, undisturbed by its black curls, its oozing of gold and red. 

She did what no else could, and immersed herself within the black with him. 

He wanted to hate her for it.

The way she asked.

Doesn’t it hurt? 

Over and over again as she brought water to wound after wound.

“No.” 

It’s a lie. 

“It doesn’t matter if it does.” 

It’s a lie. 

“Does a corpse feel pain?” 

He leans towards her, eye widening as he studies her reactions, watches as she doesn’t even flinch at all. 

“Perhaps you do know.”

She points to the scratches across his chest, asks how he got them. 

“You’ve been a ghost for five years.”

Under all that rumble, torn violently from this world just like anything that comes to be born within it and born outwith it. 

“You think you can just come back here? Raise the dead from their slumbering? Turn a beast back into a man?”

She worked tirelessly on his body, each stroke of her hands bringing his nerves back to life, pain radiating.

“You’re arrogant.”

She peeled off the black. 

“You’re a fool.” 

Washed away the red. 

“You’re cruel.” 

Mopped up the gold.

“Haunting me like this…” 

He reached forwards, grasping her arm before she could begin to wash his face, his hair. Staring into her wide, impossibly round eyes, those eyes that looked up at him now with a life that burned and flared with a fire he knew could not be kept. Nothing that burns that brightly stays for long. He thinks that it will only take one squeeze of his hand and all that goodness would be extinguished, just like that. 

Yet. 

He releases her. 

… 

He glances past her, watches the lip of his father’s neck sag beneath the water’s surface, disappearing momentarily. 

There’s silence. 

Yes.

Silence.

His chest hurts, his shoulders, too. He’s suddenly aware of his body in a way that he hasn’t been in years, can feel it without reflection. 

Her fingers lace over and then under his eyepatch, pushing it over his hair and it falls into the water. 

His eye widens, his throat stiffening. 

Here it is. Proof of what I truly am! No clothes, no titles, no pretences. Look at me, and despair! 

Yet her face…

It does not move to cry, like Mercedes’s would.

it does not move to spit hot holy revenge, like Sylavin’s would. 

it does not bark at him for being such an idiot, like Felix’s would.

It.

Softens.

And she smiles. 

Inhuman, inhuman, inhuman and yet! 

She smiles and touches along that still-healing scar, bringing pain to the surface, that socket hollowed out like the soft innards of a pomegranate.

Her hand cuts through the darkness, and immerses him in the blue.

And. And she says. 

You’re not dead. 

Not yet.   
  
The proof’s in the water.

It runs over him, purified. 

* * *

“Thank you.”

What for? 

His fingers lost in her hair as he gently holds her head, lowering it into the bath.

All his wounds have come to heal, skin rejoining skin, white flags peppering his body. All but one, that which El struck thrust into his shoulder when she could so easily have thrust it into his heart. 

The water’s clear.

Her fingers curl around his own, her eyes thin slats of supernatural green. 

It’s just them. 

Only them. 

She smiles, a smile that reaches the edges of her eyes. 

“Thank you…” he repeats, “For inviting me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> This was really just a quick piece for me to try to get to grips with Dimitri's voice. I absolutely adore his character & so writing him was a little bit intimidating, particularly as he's such a mess of complexes that still manage to be this coherent whole. I really hope you enjoyed this & I would be so grateful if you left me a review letting me know what you thought, critically or otherwise! 
> 
> Thanks again!


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